Andrei Codrescu Quotes

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Only where there is language is there world.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Words are not brains, you know.

Being that can be understood is language.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

... the daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.